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Prophet of Reason

Science, Religion and the Origins of the Modern Middle East

Peter Hill

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English
Bloomsbury
30 July 2024
An eighteen-year-old reads Voltaire and Volney and loses his religion. It’s 1818 in Ottoman Damietta and Muslims and Christians are questioning everything. Mikha’il Mishaqa walks away from the Catholic Church. Thirty years later, in 1848, he announces his new faith: Evangelical Protestantism, scandalising his community and kicking off a battle of polemics. The world darkens. In 1860 Mishaqa barely escapes death in the most notorious event in Damascus: a massacre of several thousand Christians. We are presented with a paradox: rational secularism and violent religious sectarianism came of age at the same time.

By tracing Mishaqa’s life through this tumultuous era, where empires jostled for control, Peter Hill answers the question: What did people in the Middle East actually believe? It’s a world where one man could be a Sunni, Jew and Orthodox Christian in the span of his life and German missionaries walked naked in the streets of Valletta.
By:  
Imprint:   Bloomsbury
Country of Publication:   United Kingdom
Dimensions:   Height: 234mm,  Width: 153mm,  Spine: 27mm
ISBN:   9780861547364
ISBN 10:   0861547365
Pages:   368
Publication Date:  
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Undergraduate
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Peter Hill is a historian of the modern Middle East, specialising in the Arab world in the long nineteenth century. He is the author of Utopia and Civilisation in the Arab Nahda and has published articles in Past & Present, the Journal of Arabic Literature, and Journal of Global History.

Reviews for Prophet of Reason: Science, Religion and the Origins of the Modern Middle East

"'A masterful and captivating book that rescues one of the greatest thinkers of nineteenth-century Syria from obscurity.  Mikha'il Mishaqa bursts from the pages as a three-dimensional character and a pioneer in the debates on secularism and religious freedom in the modern Arab world.  An outstanding intellectual biography.' -- Eugene Rogan, author of The Arabs 'Deeply researched and engagingly written, Prophet of Reason gives us the turbulent life of a remarkable individual. But Mikha’il Mishaqa’s circuitous intellectual and professional path through the political, socioeconomic, and ideological ferment of nineteenth-century Ottoman Lebanon illuminates a larger canvas of independent spiritual restlessness and institutional rebellion that challenges received notions of ""sectarian"" identities and fixed orthodoxies in the shifting colonial world of the global nineteenth century. Peter Hill’s sympathetic and beautifully contextualised study is at once a gripping biography and an intellectual history of how religious faith and doubt, legacies of rational thinking both local and far-flung, and human networks—contentious and affectionate—were fluid shapers of a history we too often view as set in stone.' -- Marilyn Booth, Khalid bin Abdullah Al Saud Professor for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World"


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